On Cars and Drives—Or, How to Put Some Adventure into the Modern Road Trip

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Today, there’s little adventure in most mid-range road trips. We’re talking about your standard Detroit-to-Chicago, New York-to-Boston, L.A.-to-Vegas drives, the 4–7 hour jaunts that are relatively easy on both the car and the driver. Modern motoring simply isn’t all that difficult; you can pick a spot on a map, fuel up your car (provided it’s not electric), and make it there without worry or concern. The car you’ll drive is likely crushingly devoid of character, charm, or quirk. The most exciting decision you’ll make will center around which fast-food joint to sample and, thus, the swiftness and violence with which your next bathroom experience will occur.

The antidote involves finding a route or a vehicle (or both) outside of the modern commuting norm, a car with compromise, something that will make the miles pass with a sense of occasion—and a route that will bear some impact on the experience. Neither needs to be particularly torturous, mind you, but a curvy road with a view never hurts.

Now you’re getting back to the romantic notion of road-tripping, the memorable weekend jaunt that pleasures with whiffs of adventure. We were given the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with this soft-focus image of the wheeled odyssey in the run-up to this year’s Pebble Beach festivities in Monterey.

Our chariot would be the seemingly perfect tool for the roads on which we’d lay our breadcrumbs: the 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata. Compromises? Where do we start? There are just two seats, a smallish trunk, and no formal glove box. Perfect. The route, oh, the route would be envious, a rip up the California coast from Santa Barbara to the Monterey Peninsula with a minimum of freeway slogging and a maximum of Pacific Highway 1. Even better than all of that, we’d get to truly kick back and enjoy ourselves, something the hustle and bustle of reviewing a few hundred cars per year rarely allows. Well, besides this assignment. And ultimately covering the Pebble Beach happenings upon reaching our destination. But enough about that.

Hugging the coast, Highway 1 would take us some 230 miles to Monterey in fine fashion—at least, so we figured. Stockholm Syndrome from Michigan’s typically straight, broken, and sad road situation meant even the thought of sinewy Highway 1 practically had us practicing our heel-toe technique in the airplane seat on the flight westward.

Inevitably, perhaps, reality would fall somewhat short of our sky-high expectations, because the Pacific Coast highway by day is pretty much a moving traffic jam clogged by a seemingly endless number of motorhomes and rented Ford Mustang convertibles. Seriously, public, isn’t it possible to take in the landscape while moving semi-quickly?

Undeterred, we let the rolling chicanes become fodder for a fun little challenge: taking advantage of Highway 1’s pathetically short passing zones using the Mazda’s nearly as weak 155 horsepower. The fourth-generation Miata is by no means the sort of car that can easily dispatch a triple pass in 50 yards of dotted yellow lines, but the new model’s low curb weight certainly gives it more pep than any Miata before. It is with this glass-half-full mentality that we began picking off slow-moving gawkers one and sometimes two at a time with screaming second- and third-gear passes.

Those successful attempts bought us merciful five-minute blasts without traffic on a cliffside roller-coaster ride. The monotony of staring at the backs of campers for miles on end made these rare, road-to-ourselves jaunts all the sweeter. The Miata excels at this sort of back-road driving, its dainty body leaning dramatically even at a six- or seven-tenths pace, the peerless six-speed manual’s shift lever embracing gates like old friends, while the rev-happy 2.0-liter engine ricochets a raspy blat off the rock walls just inches away. A ribbon of blacktop seemingly tossed at the bluffs to see where it would stick, the good sections of Highway 1 mostly lack straightaways longer than a few hundred feet, and constantly sawing at the Miata’s three-spoke steering wheel never grew tiresome. Reality, however flickering, was finally lining up with the fantasy.

Inevitably, we’d run into another camper and have to entertain ourselves with the strategic passing game. The stunning views and the cool sea breeze on a postcard-worthy sunny day were fallbacks, but ones that grew nearly as monotonous as the ass end of an RV. Indeed, a deeply rooted jealousy of Californians’ good life had us rolling our eyes. Rounding yet another bend, yet another ocean view would fill the windshield and the biting hypothetical “oh, look, another achingly beautiful vista worthy of Monet’s brushes” would escape the corners of our smirk.

Those simply aren’t words this author has even thought while traversing, say, I-94 between Ann Arbor and Chicago. But then no one in his or her right mind would look at that barren, truck-clogged east/west splinter of concrete and think of driving a small roadster topless across its length. With the right car, even an artery as odious as I-94 could be defibrillated. With our California vacation terminating in Monterey without a single breakdown or noteworthy setback beyond some sunburn, it was a singularly great experience, thanks to the right car and the right road. If our five-hour adventure had a takeaway, it’s that adhering to the romantic notion of road-tripping today demands more rigor be put into your selection of its context. We’re not saying the car needs to threaten to leave you stranded—we’re familiar with that sort of road trip, be it in a group of classic Lamborghinis, a grungy old French car, or a Tesla Model S—or the road needs to be so awful as to be ironically interesting, but an injection of compromise never hurts.

Arriving in Monterey a little redder than when we left Santa Barbara but otherwise completely cogent, free of oil stains, and without having exerted too much effort, our voyage was far more stimulating and only slightly longer than it would have been had we taken, say, the soul-sucking 101 freeway. Now, had we taken the 101 but driven a Yugo . . .